The Lying Pinwheel
by Metarie
Summary: She laughs. "Oh, you'd remember if you'd met me." She's coming down the hall towards him, swinging her tiny handbag by the strap around her wrist. "Let's go get a drink." Robert/Ariadne.


_**Disclaimer: Not mine.  
A/N: This has been sitting on my hard drive for a while now. I wanted to write a version of Robert/Ariadne that wasn't based on lies and secrets. 3 Thanks for reading.**_

…

Robert hates parties with a fiery, burning passion. A necessary evil of the business world, he knows this, and they've been particularly important lately, now that he's pissed off so many people by making the decision to dissolve his father's company. Damage control, Uncle Peter told him. Whether or not Robert enjoys socializing with them is totally irrelevant.

It's an event to discuss the future of the company, what lies ahead, what their money will be used for, and so on. Robert made it very clear that he has no intention of explaining himself to any of them, much to Uncle Peter's exasperation.

"Just show up, that's all I ask," Uncle Peter said, giving up on trying to convince him to do anything else.

Robert dutifully showed up, albeit thirty minutes late. Uncle Peter made it known how displeased he was with this, but Robert couldn't bring himself to give a shit.

So far he's spent the entirety of the evening at the hotel bar, avoiding as much social interaction as possible. Unfortunately, people keep finding him anyway. The person he's currently trying to ignore and feign interest in simultaneously is apparently a former investor, determined to explain to him exactly how much of an idiot he is to be going through with this dissolution plan.

Robert nods and apologizes insincerely at regular intervals, fixing his gaze on everything and anything but the man in front of him - a task easily managed, given that he's at least a foot shorter than Robert.

From where he's standing, Robert can see right down the first floor hallway of the hotel. The elevator is at the end of it, and Robert wants so very, very badly to take advantage of this escape route. He's just starting to formulate an excuse to get away from the irate little man still chewing him out when the doors open and a small, petite brunette woman in a slinky red dress emerges.

He knows she's a total stranger, but somehow she's the most familiar thing he's seen all night.

"Excuse me," he says, cutting the man off mid-sentence and no doubt giving him something else to hate him for. _ What's one more burned bridge,_ he thinks, and he makes his way down the hall.

The woman has disappeared, but when he turns the corner he sees her keying her way into one of the rooms there. As she opens it, she catches a glimpse of him, and before he can call out to her, she hurries into the room and slams the door behind her.

This reaction strikes him as odd, but then again, he is a strange man following a woman he doesn't know back to her hotel room.

Robert laughs to himself, shaking his head a little. Something's wrong with him. Obviously.

He turns to leave, already trying to put her out of his mind, when he hears the door she closed moments earlier creak open again. He looks and she's standing there, door propped open with her foot, looking at him warily.

"Something I can help you with?" she asks.

"Uh..." Now Robert just feels foolish. "No. Sorry. I thought you were someone I knew?"

She smiles a little and moves her foot, letting the door fall closed. "How do you know I'm not?"

"...Are you?"

"No." She laughs. "Oh, you'd remember if you'd met me." She's coming down the hall towards him, swinging her tiny handbag by the strap around her wrist. "Let's go get a drink."

The woman turns the corner and heads out into the party, and Robert watches her for a moment to see if she looks back. She doesn't.

Of course he follows her.

When he joins her at the bar, she's already swirling a straw around in a drink. She smiles when she sees him.

"So..." he says, feeling awkward and maybe a little giddy. "Are you here alone?"

"Nope," she says. "My friends are asleep back in the room."

This strikes him as odd. "They party a little too hard or something?"

She laughs. "Or something, yeah."

"I'm Robert."

"I know." Her brown eyes twinkle at him, and he swears up and down he's seen them before. "I'm Ariadne."

"Ariadne," he says. "You're right. I would've remembered you."

…

They talk for another hour, and Robert is starting to genuinely enjoy himself and her when something starts beeping in her purse. Ariadne pulls out her phone and silences it.

"I'll be right back," she tells him, and she disappears back down the hall.

Robert finishes his drink and another one and then another while he waits, watching the guests at his party slowly disperse, finally ignoring him as much as he'd been ignoring them. When Ariadne finally comes back, the only people left are sitting at a table, apparently having a meaningful conversation with Uncle Peter. The only allies he has left, he assumes.

"Everything okay?" he asks her, as she sits back down next to him.

"Oh, yeah, it's fine," she says. "Just checking on my friends."

"What, to make sure they weren't having any bad dreams?"

"Good guess," she says. "My friends and I are all about dreams."

"What does that mean?"

"We work _in_ them." Ariadne leans in, conspiratorially, and Robert wonders if maybe she's a little tipsy. _"In_ people's dreams."

"You're kidding," says Robert. "You're one of those... Extractors?"

"No, I'm the Architect," she says. "I design the dreamscapes. I don't usually go in with them. I just babysit."

"Do they care that you're out here talking to me while they're... whatever?" Robert asks.

Ariadne shrugs. "I'm sure when they find out, they'll be very annoyed."

"Why?"

"They get annoyed about a lot of stupid things."

Robert decides not to ask. "So. You go into people's dreams," he says, slowly. "And you steal things from them."

"More or less," she says, sipping daintily at her drink.

"I've heard about this kind of thing before."

"I'm not surprised." Ariadne sets her glass down on the bar.

"Why is that?"

She ignores this. "Let's go upstairs," she says.

…

Robert can't even remember the last time somebody ripped his clothes off like this. Actually, he doesn't think he's been with anyone this enthusiastic. Not that he's complaining.

"You don't have some ulterior motive here, do you?" he asks her, breathlessly, as she starts fumbling with his belt buckle.

"Not today," she says, and she pushes him back onto the bed.

…

When Robert wakes up, there's sunlight pouring through the window, and he's alone. He wants to close his eyes, revel in the memories of the previous night and push the hangover as far away as possible, but then he realizes it's entirely possible that none of it was real.

He stays in the shower for a while, that morning.

…

_Extraction, dreamscapes, architecture of the mind._ He can't remember if he actually spoke to anyone about such bizarre concepts, or if he made it all up. Or it he did have the conversation, and he did meet Ariadne, but she was in the process of stealing something out of his head for her own reasons.

Except all they did was have sex. So that doesn't make sense.

Still - he remains suspicious. The fact that he (stupidly, idiotically) fell asleep in his hotel room with her and woke up alone makes him more than a little nervous.

So when Robert runs into her at a coffee shop around the corner from his office, he's completely taken aback.

"Fancy meeting you here," she says, her mouth quirking up into a lopsided smile. She's dressed quite differently than when he last saw her _(saw her dressed, that is)_ - casual, jeans with a blue cardigan, a cheery yellow scarf loosely arranged around her neck. Robert decides, absently, that he likes this much better than the fancy dress.

"Yes, what an interesting coincidence," he says, trying to recover and be cool when he feels anything but.

"Oh please," Ariadne says, rolling her eyes. "You don't think you're dreaming right now, do you?"

"Well, how do I know I'm not?"

She shrugs. "I guess you don't," she says. "But you're not."

"How do I know I can trust you?" Robert asks. "Maybe you're trying to extract something from my head right now."

"I have three things to say to that," says Ariadne, looking a little bored. "First, like I already told you, I'm not an Extractor. I'm an Architect. I don't normally go into people's heads, and I didn't go into yours the other night, and I'm not there now. Second, no offense, but you've got nothing worth extracting anymore. And third." She locks her eyes onto his. "You can't trust me. But I won't ever lie to you."

Robert can't put a finger on where his fascination with this girl, essentially a total stranger, comes from - her job? Her name? The way her hair frames her face, or the pristine, flawless skin hidden from view by her scarf – it could be anything, really, or all of those. But he senses, somehow, that... there's something. Something underneath, buried, and now that he's noticed it it's like a pebble rolling around in his shoe. They're edging close to something terrifying, something secret, something he should know already.

"Then let me ask you something," says Robert, sounding more unsteady than he would like for reasons he couldn't explain if anyone asked. "Have you ever been in my head?"

Ariadne breathes a deep breath in through her nose and lets it out slowly, contemplating him, studying his face. "Yes," she finally says. "I have."

"Prove it," says Robert.

Without a word, Ariadne takes a drawing pad out of her bag. She sketches something, rough and quick, then hands it to him.

A pinwheel.

Tears prick the corners of his eyes and he wipes them away, angrily. When he looks up, Ariadne has disappeared.

…

Robert hires a private investigator and sends him after Ariadne, hoping to find out anything - anything at all - about the girl who apparently knows everything about him.

It only takes a day for her to come storming into his office in a rage.

"I'd really like to know why you're having me followed," she demands.

"Hello, Ariadne, how are you?" says Robert, leaning back in his chair. "Please, come in."

"I'm waiting," she says, crossing her arms.

"For what?"

"An explanation. Obviously."

"Well, that makes two of us."

They stare at each other, both unflinching, until finally Ariadne looks away. "No," she says, quietly.

"Ariadne. _Yes._ I need to know what you were doing in my head."

"No. You really don't want to know. Trust me."

Robert is frustrated and trying not to get angry. "How do you know about the pinwheel?" he hisses. "No one knows about that. No one."

Ariadne is staring at the ground, shaking her head. "Robert..."

"Why won't you just tell me?"

"Because it would hurt you more than you know," she says. "You have no idea."

"Not knowing hurts worse," says Robert.

She sighs, slowly, and seems to sink a little into herself. "Breaking up your father's company," she says. "We planted that idea in your head. It worked."

Robert suddenly feels lightheaded. "Oh my god," he says, putting his hands on his desk, trying to steady himself. He can't see straight.

"Not that it'll make you feel any better, but it was all to put a man's family back together," she says, but Robert can barely hear her. "I'm sorry, Robert."

The next time Robert is aware of his surroundings, Ariadne is long gone, and the sky is turning orange.

…

The next few nights are sleepless, spent sitting in window seats or wandering through his father's mansion, occasionally considering going through the boxes and boxes of things Robert is reluctant to touch.

In the precious few minutes of sleep he does manage to grab, all he can see and feel is her, her hair falling in curtains around his face, her soft lips touching his and smiling against his neck.

…

It takes a long time, but he finally decides.

_What's done is done._

He tracks down her cell number.

"I don't care," he tells her.

"What?"

"What if I don't care?"

Silence.

"Ariadne?"

"That's a big, big What If."

"It doesn't have to be."

"Robert." He can't tell if she's angry or sad. "You should care."

"But it's fine. It worked out. And… you said it helped someone."

"Yes, but… we lied to you. We manipulated you. I helped. I got paid to do it."

"Ariadne," he says. "It doesn't matter anymore."

She laughs a little, then sighs into the phone. Then, finally - "You have no idea what you're getting yourself into, Robbie."

"I'd get into anything with you," he hears himself say, and as the words float out in the open for the first time, he sees, with new eyes, how absurdly true it is.


End file.
